08/13/2026
Ten years ago today, the gauge on the Amite River at Denham Springs read 45.52 feet, and it was still climbing. Flood stage is 29 feet. The previous record was 41.5 feet.
Numbers like that don't mean much until you watch the water come up your own driveway.
By the time it was over, about 15 members of our team had water in their homes, and our Denham Springs office flooded too. One team member's house flooded so badly that he and his family spent months sharing a house with fourteen people while repairs were underway. Cars, furniture, tools, photo albums, the first several feet of everyone's life, all gone over a single weekend.
Those first days were chaos. Cell towers were down, so we ran a phone tree, then tried Facebook, then email, then anything else we could think of. Each morning, we went over a list with our CEO, checking off who we'd heard from.
But people just started showing up.
Joey Coco, now our CEO, spent those first days in his boat with our client Mike Telich, pulling neighbors and strangers out of their homes.
Adam Jurey had accepted a job with us two weeks earlier and hadn't started yet. His house flooded. He called to ask if the offer still stood. In his words: "I called John to make sure I was still good to come on board with everything that had happened. He said, 'Yeah, if you can run a mop and a squeegee. We had an office flood.' There was never an issue when I had to leave or take care of something. Help was always offered. It really made me feel like this was a family, because F&T let me do what I needed to do at the time for my family."
Within days we had sign-up sheets going and roughly five crews rotating through houses, cutting out drywall and hauling decades of belongings to the curb. Others went out on their own to help friends and family, and the people who weren't gutting houses were collecting donations and making sandwiches for the crews who were.
Our Shreveport office took up a collection, sent a gift card to every affected employee, then drove down and joined the gutting crews themselves. It was one of the kindest things any of us have been part of.
What stood out most was how fast, and how completely, everyone showed up to help, even people who'd lost everything themselves. Ten years is long enough for the memory of just how bad it was to fade, but not nearly long enough to forget how people responded.
To everyone who launched a boat, swung a hammer, made a sandwich, wrote a check, or just answered the phone so someone would know you were okay: thank you. We remember.
📷 Photos shared by our employees. Thank you to everyone who dug these out.
